[garybarth]

Hi All,

I can shed some light on the Drake statue delay. The statues arrived Stateside last week and were shipped to the distributors. However, I noticed a potential problem that I wanted addressed before the statues were shipped. The factory suggested that they add an additional attachment point between Drake's knee and the soldier's arm to ensure that there would never be any structural issues over time because of the amount of weight being held up. This wasn't in the original prototype and was added during production.

Unfortunately, in doing so, they pushed the main attachment point of the post that comes out of Drake's hand and goes into the soldier's shoulder over just enough that if you don't slide it in carefully, you could snap off Drake's pinky. Rather than risk sending these all out and having to send out hundreds of replacement units because of broken pinkies, we're opening each unit, doing a QA check, making sure the figures fit together correctly and adding a foam insert in the post coming out of Drake's hand to aid cosumers in putting the statue together.

We're also having the factory make some extra Drake figures for the distributors to have on standby in case they need to replace one for a customer. We're locating a facility in the L.A. area and it should take us only a few days to go through the shipment. The replacement units should be arriving around the 16th, so we should be able to get the statues out pretty quickly after that. I appreciate everyone's patience, but I'd rather make sure that you're getting a quality product that doesn't break while you're attempting to assemble it.

Thanks,
Gary Barth
Sr. Manager
Fabrication Arts
SIEA